URSA’s Done; FLIN’s Begun
I need to ask for a moment of silence in remembrance of the URSA brothers, Alleycat and iBorrow. (Pause…) And now it’s time to move on.Â
Our FLIN Project officially began on October 1, but nothing really exciting happened then. We have been working on some parts of the new project for months, while others can’t begin until people who don’t actually report to us do some things that we’d like to see happen. So, work just flowed around that October 1 date without even noticing it.
Here’s a brief update: The FLIN Project has a staff component and a public component. Each one is a complex bundle of goals, objectives, and activities. The main goal of the staff component is to make staff work easier and less time consuming by letting automation do the tasks whenever possible. Some of that will involve making automation do things it doesn’t yet do. And a lot of it will involve training (i.e. TBLC Continuing Education) to show library staff how to get the biggest bang for the buck out of tools that are already out there. More on that in future posts.
The public component’s main goal is to make it easy for patrons to initiate their own ILL requests from anywhere. Just like Alleycat and iBorrow, but with the whole state as the ‘group’. We’ve been building the early parts of that for several weeks, and a couple of libraries are already using our prototype tools. Our successes so far tell us that we’re on the right track. And the problems we’ve run into so far tell us this will be no stroll in the park.
I love analogies–OK, I’m addicted to them–and to me this is like the early days of the space program, when we knew we wanted land a man on the moon, but we weren’t sure exactly how to do that.